gary numan

Elsewhere is always pleased to bring local vinyl to your attention (see Super Turtle and Body Corporate) and so here's another welcome opportunity: the album release of Auckland 80s electronic outfit Car Crash Set, here collected on vinyl by (of course) a German company.
The Germans have a thing for archiving Kiwi music on record (in the...

Maybe it’s because he’s wearing what look to be his pyjamas – great big cottony, flowy things covered in only-safe-at-night checks – that John Taylor of Duran Duran looks extremely tired and bored.
Good-looking in a cheekbones and quiffed hair way, you understand. But bored witless nonetheless.
It's early 1993 and...

The Eighties was probably no more different or diverse than any other decade, but it does seem weird on reflection: Ronald Reagan and the Rubik Cube; the arrival of CDs, CNN and MTV; personal computers and ghetto blasters; Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta; Ozzy eating a bat and suave Duran Duran; cocaine and Jane Fonda's workout videos;...

The Tin Syndrome were very much a Wellington band in a number of ways. Their reputation didn't translate much into the rest of New Zealand in the early Eighties, but more than that they also had what we might call "Wellington" concerns to the fore.
If you live in the capital city of any Western country you are bound to see a lot of...

Although seemingly past their use-by date, Duran Duran are enjoying that perfect storm where nostalgia by their Eighties fans collides with a generation of younger musicians who are plundering that decade for ideas and sounds.
And suitably decked out in aggressive black clobber for their first video they launch this album with an admirable...

The witty nom de disque here belongs to Michael Logie, former bassist with New Zealand's Mint Chicks who makes some steps as a solo artist working with computers, electrobeat and processed vocals.
You can guess the words "squelchy" and "edgy" will be applied to this -- as they invariably are when lo-fi computer sounds are...

About 15 minutes into a very casual and
chatty conversation with Gary Numan -- during which he's talked about
his three kids, a prolonged bout of depression, almost breaking up
with his wife and then how they'd undergone IVF treatment and lost
the baby and being choked with emotion on stage – I interrupt and
say, “Many people...

Many many years ago, I interviewed the
British musician Thomas Dolby who had enjoyed a big hit with She
Blinded Me With Science in '82. It was notable for having spoken word
samples from the well-known and somewhat eccentric scientist Magnus
Pyke on it.
It was almost a gimmick hit,...

In Roman Polanski's 1988 thriller
Frantic, the actor Harrison Ford gets to play a role he would repeat
many times: Homo Panicus, the ordinary man under pressure.
When Ford's character, a surgeon from
San Francisco, arrives in Paris with his wife for a conference they
discover she has collected the wrong bag at the airport. And there
the...

Behind the unappealing nom de disque is Auckland electronica musician Kevin Tutt whose previous album Nu Scientist was a real, if overlooked, gem.
Once again located somewhere between the harder end of Brian Eno ambient-pop and slightly funky electronica -- with real instruments like cello and bass, and various vocalists alongside samples and...